The move follows an increasing trend for law firms to partner with universities to help develop legal technology, often tapping the expertise of academic institutions’ data scientists and machine learning experts. A case in point is the work of Weightmans with the University of Liverpool.

The first initiative will be to create a legal tech/reg tech tool that ‘will drastically improve how organisations interpret and implement EU legislation’. This project will address the issue by converting legal texts into an ‘intuitive and machine-analysable format, opening the way for computer-assisted compliance analysis’.

Linklaters explained that the tool will overlay regulatory requirements onto a company’s policies and using automated processes it will identify risks and gaps.

It will also identify areas where evidence of compliance is lacking, and automated risk-based analysis will quantify the risks that remain and their implications for overall compliance.

Many EU regulations are rapidly developing and are open to interpretation. Organisations are struggling to understand their vast implications for their activities, said the global law firm – hence the need for an automated solution.

Dr. Mike Sabetzadeh, Senior Research Scientist at University of Luxembourg, said: ‘Our ultimate objective is to build an integrated environment for defining compliance goals, elaborating them into actionable processes, and collecting and managing evidence to demonstrate compliance.’

While, Patrick Geortay, Linklaters Luxembourg Managing Partner, said: ‘This is a game-changing innovation, using technology in a way that we haven’t seen before. The challenge for corporations across Europe as they ensure compliance with EU regulations is huge and so this tool could have a significant time and cost-saving impact.’

‘At Linklaters, being innovative means doing things differently, unleashing our imagination to challenge the present and shape the future. As part of that, we have built a market leading legal technology capability to support our clients’ individual and evolving business needs and this project is a great example of that,’ he added.